Pop Art in German Cities, Part 3: nowhere else do art and life converge like they do in Frankfurt.
Americanization came as a real confetti bombshell to the new Federal Republic of Germany. This also becomes apparent in names--while Düsseldorf had its cult bar Creamcheese, Frankfurt, where the Americans had their headquarters and numerous barracks, retaliated with Popshop Pudding Explosion. It sold "hash pipes without any content and so-called psycho-glasses that enlarge things or refract light," the "Spiegel" writes in 1968 abut the store run by Peter Roehr and Paul Maenz, and continues: "'Psycho delicacies with hippie supplies' is how the young entrepreneurs outline the range of products on sale in Germany's one-of-a-kind establishment--a bleak 60-square-meter space with a cement floor wafting with the heavy scent of smoldering Indian incense sticks."
Several of America's largest advertising agencies open up branch offices in Frankfurt. Peter Roehr, who produced hundreds of works before his premature death at twenty-three, initially trained to be a neon sign and sign maker. He then studied art in Wiesbaden. Maenz worked as a commercial artist for Young & Rubicam in Frankfurt and New York, from where he brought impressions of booming Pop and Minimal Art back to Frankfurt. When Maenz later became a gallerist, he maintained close relationships to his colleagues in New York, such as Leo Castelli, who promoted Pop Art in the United States early on.
The Serial Arrangement Becomes the Trademark of Art from Frankfurt
The artist Thomas Bayrle was also initially active as a graphic artist in the advertising sector. For a while, he operated an agency in Frankfurt. Like Andy Warhol, who worked as a commercial illustrator before he found his way to art, Roehr's and Bayrle's artistic interest grew out of their involvement with visual advertising messages. Contracted by the McCann agency, Bayrle receives a carte blanche for a performance commissioned by the Dutch carpet manufacturer Enkalon. He covers trucks with carpeting, attaches a speech bubble to it with the brand name, and has it drive around town. He presents grid patterns with images of people and carpet structures on billboards.
The serial arrangement becomes the trademark of art from Frankfurt. Roehr, for instance, arranges beer coasters and shreds of advertisements in patterns. He also creates montages of images and sounds, in which he, for example, uses recordings from German and American radio broadcasts as well as advertising messages. In 1967, Roehr and Maenz organize the exhibition "Serial Formations" at the Studio Gallery of the University of Frankfurt with works by artists such as Carl Andre and Donald Judd. Bayrle has raincoats printed with serial motifs for a Frankfurt-based fashion studio. Models parade the coats in galleries in Essen, Cologne, and Milan.
Sights are Set on Springer, Auschwitz, the Economic Miracle
Like Düsseldorf and Berlin, the Frankfurt scene also develops political blasting power. It is the period of the student movement. In 1968, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and others, who would later found the Red Army Faction, set fires in two department stores in Frankfurt. The artist Bazon Brock attacks the Springer publishing company and its "Bild-Zeitung" newspaper, detested by the student movement, as early as 1963 at the Galerie Loehr and again in 1965 at René Block's gallery in Berlin with his happening "Bloomsday." He installs the "Living Room of a BILD Reader" in which barbed wire runs through cups, plates, a televised image, and butter for the purpose of dividing the room in half. According to Brock's website, in doing so he was demonstrating against the fact that the "Bild-Zeitung" made reference to the division of Germany daily.
He distributes five thousand copies of the "Bloomzeitung," adapted to look like the "Bild-Zeitung," with texts of his own at Hauptwache square in Frankfurt's pedestrian zone. In 1966 he produces the "Position Theater" in Frankfurt and designs a stage setting inspired by advertising and the mass media. The newspaper "Die Zeit" writes: "The stage bristled with pretty, lolling girls and everyday objects such as little plastic baskets, balls, garden hoses, and packets of detergent," continuing that "during their menacing activities, a horde of baseball players ... is sprinkled with a shower of delicate bras ..., which a lady who is audible taking a shower gently throws onto the stage from her little plastic stall."
The Auschwitz trials against members of the concentration camp's staff commence in Frankfurt in 1966. Bayrle produces his "Nuremburg Orgy" three years later: a kinetic object featuring an arm in a red sleeve bearing a swastika that is operated by an electric motor and repeatedly performs the Hitler salute. When Rudi Dutschke is shot in Berlin in 1968, Bayrle creates a poster that from that point onward is seen at every protest march: a picture of Dutschke with the slogan "The revolution will not die of lead poisoning!" Nowhere else do art and life, which fuels Pop Art everywhere, converge like they do in Frankfurt.